Power Distribution Units (PDUs) are used in a datacenter to control the power supply of electric equipment, such as compute nodes, storage nodes and switch nodes. Each PDU comprises a plurality of (e.g. 24 or 48) outlets each of which is coupled to one electric equipment so as to control its power supply. The number of electric equipment in the datacenter is huge, so a large number of PDUs are required.
In addition, PDUs manufactured by different vendors usually have different internal logic and different access modes. When software developers are developing infrastructure software like management & coordination (M&O) software, in order to guarantee that the software being developed is robust, reliable and stable, developers want to validate whether the software can support PDUs of different vendors. Furthermore, software developers might expect scale-out testing so as to validate whether the software can support hundreds and even thousands of PDUs, or might use hundreds and even thousands of PDUs to validate whether enough exceptions are captured. Nevertheless, to purchase PDUs of various vendors or purchase a large amount of PDUs for the above software testing will incur enormous costs, thereby being unrealistic.